Chapter 33
In Winter Quarters, Christmas Day 1846 began with a rousing boom. John Scott, who was in charge of the Church’s three small cannons, took them up on the bluff and fired off each one just as the sun rose over Winter Quarters. Many people were already up by then, and they poured out of their houses to see what was happening. When they realized it was because of Christmas, there were cheerful cries of “Happy Christmas,” “Merry Christmas,” and “Christmas Gift” all up and down the street.
Nathan stepped back inside the house as Lydia appeared from behind the blanket that separated their sleeping area from the children’s. She was in her nightdress and looked very sleepy. He smiled. For Lydia, rising was always a slow process. He went to her and took her in his arms. “Happy Christmas, Lydia.”
She pried one eye open wider. “Was that what that was?”
He nodded, chuckling.
Emily peeked out from behind the blanket that partitioned off their “bedroom.” “Happy Christmas, Papa.”
“Christmas Gift,” he answered.
Nathan left immediately after breakfast. He stopped for a moment in front of their hut and took a deep breath. It was going to be a beautiful day. The sun was rising in a perfectly clear sky. There had been a hard freeze during the night and his breath came out in large puffs of silvery white, but it would warm up soon enough. “Good,” he said aloud. “A beautiful day to celebrate the birth of the Savior.”
He was out this morning because he wanted to ensure that all of the families in his ward would have a good Christmas. In some cases that would be a matter of just stopping in to wish them a good Christmas and to let them know he was thinking of them. In other cases it would not be so simple. There were women whose husbands were with the Mormon Battalion or on missions. For all intents and purposes these women were widows and needed special attention. Then there was Mary Northrop, whose husband, Amos, was near death. Nathan was on his way to the gristmill to make sure that the family had something to eat, and he would try to bring them some comfort and see if he could do anything for Amos’s suffering.
It was a holiday, and it might be saluted with a volley from the cannons, and there would be Christmas suppers tonight—meager but festive—but it was still a workday. There was simply too much to be done to have it be otherwise. Even though it was not yet eight o’clock, everywhere he looked there was a bustle of activity. Men and boys were laying a sod square on the ground, the first foundations of another home. Young girls sat on benches in front of homes or wagons spinning flax into thread or tending younger brothers and sisters. Boys moved back and forth carrying baskets filled with a variety of clothing or goods. He passed women who stood before kettles hung over fires in their yards, starting to do the day’s laundry. He saw Sister Stone, another ward member, coming back from the creek, staggering under the load of two buckets of water hanging from a yoke on her shoulder. He walked quickly to her, took it from her, and carried it the last way to the wagon that served as “home” to her, her husband, and three children.
She touched his arm as he set the buckets down. “Thank you so much, Bishop Steed.” She spoke with a lilting English accent.
“Happy Christmas, Sister Stone.”
“Christmas Gift, Bishop. God bless.”
He walked on, amazed once again at the bustle around him. Men were chopping wood, repairing chimneys, shoveling dirt and grass up on top of their houses to make roofs. Behind a log cabin, a man had what looked like a yearling heifer strung up on a block and tackle and was skinning it out. Nathan passed one open-ended sod building where five or six men were working on building or repairing a wagon. That was a sober reminder that all of this was temporary. Come spring, they would be moving west, and preparations for that day were never set aside for very long.
As he rounded the corner, he saw the nearly completed Winger cabin. Without being aware of it, he frowned. There were the others in his ward who presented a different kind of challenge than widows or families who lived in tents and wagons. John Winger was one of those. The Winger family had come west with the Orville Allen rescue group that Nathan and Joshua had accompanied. But instead of staying at Mount Pisgah, as the refugees had been counseled to do, Brother Winger insisted on coming on. Brigham had not been pleased, but he assigned them to Nathan’s ward and asked him to work with them.
He blew out his breath in mild exasperation. It was Sister Winger and their two children who suffered because of her husband’s laziness. All the way across Iowa Territory, John Winger had been a source of constant irritation to everyone. His cattle were constantly lost because he simply turned them loose. And unfortunately there were others like him. On more than one day the company had been forced to lay over while they spent the day rounding up stray cattle.
Brother Winger had been an eye-opener for Nathan. Some of those they had found in the poor camp on the west bank of the Mississippi were poor because of the terrible circumstances which had befallen them. Carl Rogers was a good example of that. With the store burned, the brickyard gone, their house abandoned, Carl and Melissa were absolutely destitute. But Carl was a hardworking man. Even though he was still weak and hurting from his punctured lung, he was up helping the family in whatever way he could. Joseph Fielding and his two sisters were another example. Poor, yes, but down and out, definitely not.
But Brother Winger? On their arrival here, Nathan had gotten a group of men together and raised them a log cabin. Even though he himself and several of the other men had only sod huts, they had cut the logs and erected a one-room cabin for the Wingers. And what did John Winger do while they were doing that? He stood back with his thumbs in his belt and watched them work. Since they had finished the main structure Brother Winger had done nothing more to find shutters for the windows—Nathan could see that the same thin blanket was all that kept them from the cold—or to make it more comfortable for his family.
He sighed, loudly enough that a passing woman looked at him in surprise. Embarrassed, Nathan smiled and waved. “Merry Christmas.”
“Christmas Gift,” she murmured back, still looking at him strangely.
At the gristmill he would get a sack of cornmeal for Sister Winger and the children. They were the ones who suffered. And so, irritated at John Winger or not, Bishop Nathan Steed was on his way to make sure they had food and got at least some kind of cheer on Christmas Day.
He thought with longing on those first days as bishop when he had been given just three or four families to care for. Now the wards were made up by city block and each block had twenty lots. In his block there were twenty-eight families. His own family, for example, occupied three lots, but with the addition of Carl and Melissa there were five separate family units living on those three lots. On the lots of several others were wagons or tents with families living in them until they could build more permanent shelters.
As he walked along, he thought of some of the others, and that pushed away his gloomy mood. It was Christmas, and though there were challenges in carrying out his calling as bishop, there was also great joy. For the most part, his families were faithful and cheerfully endured very difficult circumstances. They shared their resources in a manner that was most gratifying. Even in death they showed remarkable strength. In the few weeks since they had formed his ward, he had already lost five people—an elderly man, a mother who left her husband with four children to watch over, and three young children. And now it looked like Amos Northrop would be next. Those losses had really been hard, but for the most part, his people wept for a time, then threw back their shoulders and went on with life.
With that, he picked up his step, smiling happily now as he passed others and called out a holiday greeting to them.
By ten o’clock, the sun was warm enough that the women put on only light shawls. The ground was thawing and the challenge was to stay out of the mud. They left the older children in charge of the younger ones and set out. Mary Ann, Lydia, Caroline, Jenny, Jessica, and Melissa all walked together, chattering happily.
“What a beautiful morning!” Melissa exclaimed, throwing back her head and closing her eyes against the bright sun.
Mary Ann laughed, then spontaneously hugged her older daughter. “And how good it is that you are here with us to enjoy it!” she said.
“Oh, yes,” the others said. “We’re so glad you’re here, Melissa.”
There were sudden tears in her eyes. “When those men started beating on Carl back in Nauvoo, I thought the world had come to an end. Now, knowing that it changed his mind about our coming west, I’m almost glad—” She stopped, blushing furiously as she realized what she was about to say. “Oh dear,” she cried. “Don’t tell Carl I said that.”
The others laughed. “We promise,” Lydia said, reaching out to touch her arm. “And we’re glad that whatever it was that brought it about, you and Carl are here with us now.”
“I was surprised,” Jenny said, “that Carl didn’t object any more than he did to young Carl and David and Caleb being baptized.”
“Me too,” Melissa said happily. “Sarah wants to be baptized also, but Carl says she has to wait until she’s ten and old enough to make up her own mind.”
“That’s all right,” Mary Ann said. “Carl is a good man, Melissa. We all know that.”
She nodded in quiet pleasure. “I know.”
Jessica broke in. “Look, there’s Sister Richards.”
They turned to see where she was pointing. Then Caroline smiled. “You mean the
Sisters
Richards.”
And so it was. Mary Richards, wife of Samuel W. Richards, lived in a tent near the center of the city. Her sister-in-law Jane Richards, wife of Franklin D. Richards, lived nearby in one of the cabins that the Steed women were just now passing. Franklin and Samuel Richards were brothers and had been called to serve together as missionaries in England.
Mary looked up, saw them coming, and waved. The six women turned off the street and walked over to where the other two women were standing. They had a fire going beneath a kettle of steaming water and piles of laundry waiting for their turn in the large tin washtub beside the fire.
“Good morning, Mary,” Mary Ann said. The others all greeted the two sisters-in-law as well. “Surely you’re not doing laundry on Christmas Day,” Caroline said, teasing them.
Mary Richards, who was a woman Caroline very much admired, pulled a face. “Jane and I decided that it was better to spend Christmas over a washtub than to sit and mope over our husbands being gone to England.”
They all nodded solemnly at that. Would that more of the women had the attitude of these two sisters-in-law! Throughout the encampments, which stretched now for ten or twelve miles up and down both sides of the Missouri River, there was a significant number of women without husbands. Some of those were widows, and they had it the worst. Others, like these two or Louisa Pratt, whose husband, Addison, was in the Sandwich Islands, were left alone when their husbands were called to serve the Lord. Then there were the several hundred battalion members’ wives who now were on their own with their families. Finally, a significant number of men had left the settlements and gone to Missouri to find work and earn enough to care for their families.
The Steed women stayed with Jane and Mary for a quarter of an hour, then moved on. To a casual observer, it might have looked as though they had no purpose other than taking a walk together. But Lydia had taken Nathan’s calling as bishop as seriously as he had, and often went from home to home to let the people know they were cared for. Today she would stop at the Newel K. Whitney store and bishops’ storehouse for supplies for some of the ward families. Mary Ann also wanted to trade some salt and sugar they had for a few potatoes they could use in their Christmas dinner.
That was optimistic. Scurvy—or “blackleg” or “black canker,” as most of them called it—was rampant in the camps now that winter had fully come. The Saints knew the cause. A lack of fresh leafy green vegetables in their diet directly influenced the prevalence of the sickness. Potatoes were one of the things that seemed to help, but potatoes were in very high demand. If they were able to get one potato for every two people, it would be a fortunate day. Fresh fish also seemed to help. When they returned home, they would send the older boys down to the Missouri River—now shallow and sluggish, a full twenty feet below what it had been when they arrived in the summer—to see what they could catch.
Melissa looked around as they walked. “In some ways, this reminds me of when we first went to Nauvoo,” she said.
The others turned their heads to see what she was referring to, then nodded almost immediately. It was quite astonishing, Caroline thought, to see what had been accomplished in just the last few months. The site for Winter Quarters had not even been selected until mid-September. Now Nathan told her that in a census taken by the bishops they counted over three thousand people just in this settlement alone. And there were an estimated nine or ten thousand more altogether. Logs, straw, bricks, slabs of sod, lumber, and stone were scattered on virtually every lot, showing the great activity going on in construction. Hundreds of homes, mostly simple cabins or sod huts, were now done, but many others were under construction. Smoke from hundreds of stone or sod-brick chimneys rose in straight lines in the still morning air and gave off pleasant aromas. Wagons lined the streets and were parked in many of the yards. Some of these were newly arrived and still waited for unloading. Most were being used as homes until something better could be found.
“Tell me,” Lydia suddenly said.
Caroline turned in surprise.
“You were somewhere deep in thought,” Lydia said. “Tell me what you were thinking.”
She smiled somewhat sadly. “In a way this is starting to feel like home, and yet . . . it’s not going to be our home for very long.”
Jenny hooted. “And you’re sad about that?” she asked. “You’re going to miss our house that leaks mud whenever it rains and where the chimney won’t draw and we all nearly choke to death every time we cook a meal?”